Jean Denise Howe / The (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal

by Claire Galofaro, The (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal

by Claire Galofaro, The (Louisville, Ky.) Courier-Journal

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- By the time a stranger found 13-year-old Jean Denise Howe, dead and discarded in an alley, her body was so frozen the coroner had to let it thaw for days.

It was February 1985, an unusually bitter winter.

Someone had picked up a concrete block and, with it, ended the short and harsh life of Jean Denise, an orphan pregnant by a man no one could name.

Her killer bludgeoned her to death with the block, then stabbed her, over and over, in the abdomen..

"Two lives were taken, and nothing's been done about it," said Dorothy Beasley, a relative of the child's foster mother. "It's something that will forever stick with me."

Nearly three decades later, Beasley still thinks of the little girl, dead in that alley - and the person who appears to have gotten away with murder.

Stalled investigations

The hard-worn police file titled "Jean Howe, 1985" occupies 2 feet of a cabinet drawer on the second floor of Louisville Metro Police headquarters, alongside 474 other cases labeled "cold" because there's been no development in at least two years.

The oldest Louisville police cold case is "George Brooks, 1961," and the pile is growing: Homicide detectives have started carting in 21 unsolved killings from 2011.

"The investigation hit a brick wall. That's the reason they ended up here," said Sgt. Donny Burbrink, standing in his office surrounded by dozens of cabinets, stuffed with phone book-thick files of crime-scene photos, police reports and tips that led nowhere. "We have to jump-start them all over again."

Resurrecting cases that bedeviled everyone else in the building is slow going: Burbrink considers four arrests in 12 months a banner year. The cold case squad solved two murders in 2013, and another two in the first month of 2014. They're closing in on a few more, he said.

Across the country, cold-case clearance rates are notoriously low. A 2011 analysis by the nonprofit RAND Center on Quality Policing estimated one in 20 active investigations resulted in an arrest, and just one in 100 resulted in a conviction.

The police department could not estimate how much it costs to run the squad: its budget is taken out of the major crimes line item, with includes active homicides, sexual assaults, robbery, fraud and so on.

Louisville Metro Police Chief Steve Conrad believes his unit - with some of the most seasoned detectives on the force - is worth the comparably low return on investment. He goes to vigils for murdered citizens, and he's noticed a common theme among the relatives of those whose killings have gone unsolved.

"They want to know we're not going to forget and we are going to continue to try. I wish we had the resources to be working on every case, 100 percent of the time," Conrad said. "It's beyond symbolism, it's not lip service. We're truly trying to solve these cases."

Some will eventually be solved by DNA hits; others when witnesses get arrested and decide to start talking to save their own skins.

Occasionally, the detectives get lucky: Last month, 34-year-old David Satterfield called police, out of the blue, to confess that he murdered an 86-year-old woman in a nursing home six years earlier.

Burbrink took over the squad of four detectives last April and acknowledges the system is imperfect. Each detective is assigned six cases, so no more than a couple dozen can be actively investigated at any given time. Many of the other 450 case files, including Jean Howe's, remain in their drawers, unopened for months at a time.

"It becomes overwhelming," he said. "I have a lot of family members who call me - their brother was killed, or their son was killed. It's hard to tell somebody that their case is sitting on the sidelines. But there's no point in getting anybody's hopes up."

Beasley believes it's not too late to solve Jean Howe's murder.

"I want somebody to pay for it," she said. "I don't think somebody should get away with doing something so wrong."

'She needed somebody to love her'

Jean was a tiny girl with sad, old eyes, Beasley said. Nobody knew exactly where she'd come from - in 1973, when she was 2 years old, employees at a liquor store heard wailing in the attic. The owner went upstairs and found the child, alone and abandoned.

No one knew how long she'd been there - but it was long enough that the grate she was lying on had seared permanent scars across her back, Beasley said.

The store owner took her in and raised her for five years. But the woman was diagnosed with terminal cancer and begged her childless neighbors - Beasley's cousin and her husband - to adopt her.

Lillie Mae Howe was already 61 years old. Her husband, Charlie, was 86 when they adopted the 7-year-old girl.

Lillie Mae Howe meant well, Beasley said. But she was too old to understand the struggles of a forsaken child. Jean ran away and sometimes stayed gone a day or two before police tracked her down. She confided in Beasley, calling her Aunt Dot.

But Jean never told her about the man she'd started seeing when she was 13 years old.

After Jean was killed, one of her classmates told Beasley that Jean had met a married man at a park.

"She needed somebody to love her," Beasley said. "And I just think he showed her the affection she hadn't gotten from anybody else in her life."

Jean told Howe she was pregnant in December 1983. She was in the seventh grade.

Beasley said her cousin was devastated, and the Howes considered kicking the child out of their home. But Jean promised she'd finish school at the Teenage Parent Program, raise her child and make them proud. They let her stay.

On the morning of Jan. 28, 1985, Lillie Mae Howe watched from the window as Jean left for school, wearing her red and black wool coat. She walked to the bus stop, but as the bus pulled up, she sprinted around the corner.

At first, the Howes believed Jean had run away again. But the phone started ringing: A man told them Jean was fine but couldn't talk, the family told The Courier-Journal in a 1985 story. In another call, he gave an address that didn't exist. He phoned again to say he'd bring the girl home at 4 p.m. the next day.

He never showed. She didn't either.

A week passed. Then another.

On Feb. 9, a man walking through the alley just around the corner from Jean's home saw a hand poking out from under a discarded door, among a pile of trash behind a garage. A concrete block lay broken and bloody nearby. Jean Howe lay frozen, still wearing the wool coat.

Police determined she had been killed the day she disappeared and had been there, just around the corner, all along.

An autopsy determined she died of blunt-force trauma, and then her killer plunged a knife deep into her pregnant belly.

The only motive police could find was the 6-month-old fetus that died inside her, according to newspaper archives. The coroner held an inquest before a six-person jury, but detectives testified they could not determine the father. They had no suspects.

The jury unanimously concluded that the girl was "murdered at the hand of an as-yet-unknown assailant."

Burbrink said a person of interest is named in the file. He could not say whether it was the unborn child's father, or if that has even been determined. But last year, evidence - he would not say what sort - from the Jean Howe file was sent to the Kentucky State Police crime lab for DNA testing.

Cold-case investigations go to the back of the line, behind active cases with hot leads and pressing deadlines, and sometimes results take 18 months or more.

So in the meantime, Burbrink's team has put the case file back in its cabinet while members work on other files.